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Order of the Sinking Star: Jonathan Blow on making 'the biggest puzzle game ever'

Source

www.bbc.co.uk

Published Source updated (as of )

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The keyart from Order of the Sinking Star, showing a woman with dark hair standing and looking to the left, wearing a yellow crown and wearing grey and gold armour. Her purple cape flies out behind her showing four strands of the puzzles games in the game, in blue, pink, yellow and green, including a man standing in front of a mirror, a monster, and skipping stones.

Understand

Jonathan Blow discusses his new puzzle game 'Order of the Sinking Star' after ten years in development

Overview

Game developer Jonathan Blow is releasing 'Order of the Sinking Star', a massive puzzle game featuring roughly 1,500 puzzles designed to take around 500 hours to complete. Developed over ten years by a small team, the game combines mechanics from four pre-existing free puzzle games by other creators. To build the game, Blow created his own programming language, Jai, and a custom game engine from scratch. He also shared his scepticism regarding the integration of artificial intelligence in software development and programming education.

Key points

  • Jonathan Blow's new game, 'Order of the Sinking Star', features approximately 1,500 puzzles and an estimated 500 hours of gameplay.
  • The game combines mechanics from four pre-existing free puzzle games created by other designers, including Alan Hazelden.
  • Blow spent ten years developing the game, building a custom engine and his own programming language, Jai, from scratch.
  • Blow remains sceptical about artificial intelligence in game development, warning that over-reliance on it could lead to a future shortage of skilled programmers.
  • The developer chose to focus purely on design rather than commercial practicality, a philosophy that has characterised his previous works like Braid and The Witness.
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